It is the color of light,
The shape of sound high in the evergreens
It lies suspended in hills,
A blue line in a red sky.

I am looking at sound.

I am hearing the brightness
Of high bluffs and almond trees
I am tasting the wilderness
of lakes, rivers, and streams
Caught in an angle of song.

I am remembering water
That glows in the dawn
The motion tumbled in earth
Life hidden in mounds.

I am dancing a bright beam of light

I am remembering love.

(Ajana and I watched Love Jones again tonight, which I admit has slowly made its way into my top ten romance movies.  I’ve always been curious about who wrote the final poem that Nia Long reads at the end of the movie, I’d read somewhere that it was Sonia Sanchez, but it was this woman whose poetry I think I quite enjoy)

The movie and the book are both amazing. Its one of the few instances I’d recommend both in whatever order. While the movie embellishes the stories told in his book, adding and subtracting characters for whatever reason and deals much more in the hopeless portion of his struggle than the book for cinematic purposes, it makes up for it by being visually stunning. Everything was enriched by the so-beautiful-it-breaks-your-heart cinematography, the perfect handling of the flash backs, the way the movie seemed to be paced perfectly ebbing and flowing like the ocean.

The book on the other hand is just simply amazing. Bauby uses his words to inspire hope, despair, the power of imagination. So much so that twenty pages in I was blinking back tears. You can see the lavish meals and the wonderful trips. You dream each dream and live each memory with him. You can feel the pain at not being able to ruffle his son’s hair. All of this told with wit, humor and aplomb. All never ceasing to be amazing, not simply because of the means with which the story was told but because of it’s sheer power and magnitude. I didn’t want to stop reading it and once I finished I wanted to pick it up and read it again and again. I found myself pouring over passages lest I missed the subtle meaning of each line.

I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passages of time: rose picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark…I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

It will keep the vultures at bay.

*     *     *

From the Chapter: Twenty to One

(my favorite passage I chose because in the movie the imagery of the iceberg breaking away with the narration behind brought tears to my eyes)

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mirthra-Grandchamp is the women were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but fail to bet on the winner.

**heading to the at&t store in the morning to replace what I believe is simply a defective sim card.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether that line had in some way influenced Smith’s passage.

Smith’s second book, On Beauty borrowed elements and themes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End though the stories are strikingly different; there are scenes that directly parallel Forester’s work. It got me thinking.

Some time ago, over dinner, I got into a discussion with a friend about his disdain for hip hop. Which turned into a discussion about originality, which he felt hip hop lacked and I vehemently argued. But tonight it came to me, i wondered how much of culture is reused and recycled, how many generations have heard the same song, seen same movie, read same book over and over again, tweaked by someone else. Hip Hop is of course the easiest target, but you don’t hear people say (well you do, but not as many you’d hear calling it “the problem” with rap music) I don’t want to see the remake, it lacks originality. Couldn’t possibly watch the new Batman film because the jokers already been done amazingly by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero.

Three movies that I loved while in my younger years have the exact same plot, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) , In the Good Old Summer Time (1949), and You’ve Got Mail (1998).

It reminds me of the lesson we learned early in writing school, there are only three stories: man against man, man against nature, man against himself. I wonder if the same will eventually be said about music (there are only 10 basic beats, the rest is all repetition), and if, in knowing this, people will loosen their judgment on mediums that borrow from the work thats come before it.

I wonder how much this is understood and more likely accepted by people who are in the art’s, by nature of understanding the real possibility that they will break ground (though they try with a blunt ice pick nonetheless).

(This was mostly written at 2am last night, so I’m not sure if it’s coherent. It was sparked by my rumination on Smith’s genuis and trying to figure out who had sampled Thom Yorke’s The Erasure [mr. west of course])

When I told my new french friend that I’d watched before sunrise a few times, he said, “well, you’re either a hopeless romantic, or a you’ve been bitten by the french bug.” To which I of course replied, a bit of both. I’ve decided to live up at least to the latter by renting a few french films. (Truthfully, I’ve just been devouring good films and good books lately, see: lars and the real girl, into the wild, once, & ironman)

Tonight I watched, La Faute à Fidel! I was quite nervous about it, after reading the little white sleeve: “…9 year old Anna, a privileged young girl living in Paris and comforted by a life filled with order and routine. But over the course of a year, Anna’s structured life is thrown into turmoil when her parents are drawn into Paris’s turbulent and radical 1970’s political scene”

Turbulent? Turmoil?

I’m all for serious movies but they end up sitting there for weeks, bathed in my good intentions, mocking me, while the money siphons out of my bank account via netflix. So tonight I decided to either give it a go or send it back and the end result was surprising. Was it dramatic? Yes, but it was more so clever, funny, touching and interesting.

From Rotten Tomatoes (the less scary and more fitting description):

How do our experiences shape us, and how is political consciousness formed? Blame It on Fidel uses a light, charming touch to shed light on these questions. At the film’s epicenter is whip-smart Anna, a feisty Parisian girl forced to assimilate cataclysmic changes when her parents decide to devote themselves full time to radical activism. Anna, kicking and screaming, must adjust to refugee nannies with strange cooking habits, a cramped apartment filled with noisy, scruffy revolutionaries, and the humiliation of no longer being allowed to attend her beloved catechism class. The fun of Blame It on Fidel is watching Anna valiantly sort through the dizzying array of contradictory ideologies flying at her–from communism to Greek mythology, from Vietnamese folktales and women’s rights to Catholic morality. The film’s emotional power arises from Anna’s transformation from close-minded bourgeois princess to open-hearted truth seeker and her gradual internalization of what her parents, albeit clumsily, are trying to accomplish. Seamless and energetic, Blame It on Fidel features substantive, yet buoyant, performances by Julie Depardieu and Stefano Accorsi, as well as a hilarious turn by Benjamin Feuillet as the little brother who unwittingly teaches Anna a thing or two.

I recommend it to all my cinephile friends and then some.